


silk and weaver

by windupclock



Category: Spider-Man (Comicverse)
Genre: F/M, Gwen Stacy Lives, gwen with spider-powers that is, not specifically spider-gwen, spider-gwen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 21:43:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17312372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windupclock/pseuds/windupclock
Summary: Gwen Stacy is supposed to die.She doesn't.





	silk and weaver

There’s a moment of thrilling terror as the Goblin’s bomb strikes her in the center of her chest, and then there’s a scream and cold air and falling for what feels like forever.

Gwen falls, and she falls, and she falls, and then she lands on the hard pavement and hears something snap. Her eyes close without meaning to, shutting out the light pollution and the few stars she can see. The same ones she used to see from her window, the ones her dad made constellations out of for her when she couldn’t see any of the ones in the books. Connecting airplanes and helicopters and fireworks with the stars so that they were different every night, and spinning stories about each one just for her.

It would have been poetic, if they were the last thing she saw, but the last thing she remembers was the look on Peter’s face, his mask in tattered shreds around his neck and his face a blank tragedy. The scream had been his, she thinks.

 _Let’s cross that one off the list of date ideas_ , Gwen thinks, and then everything goes dark.

 

* * *

 

Soft blankets are wrapped around Gwen when she wakes up.

Her head aches, and there’s a tingling in her elbow, and her neck feels like she had a run-in with the worst executioner in the land, but she’s alive. She’s breathing.

Gwen expects to see a hospital room. They must have found her before her heart stopped, before she bled out, and operated on her just in time, and when she opens her eyes she’ll see her mom and dad, patient by her bedside, and the ache in the back of her hand will be the tug of an IV snaking into her veins. Her mom will cry out and pull her into a hug, mindful of her wires and the beeping of the machines, and her father will rest a hand on top of hers and smile.

Instead, she wakes up alone.

The room is silent, deathly so. Not even a room. A cave, she thinks, staring at the array of stalactites looming down. Her blankets are strange and twisted around her. She isn’t in a bed. In fact -- she cranes her head, ignoring the way it makes her head ring, and spies two long strings of silk hanging down from stalactites, holding the blankets around her up. Not a bed. A cocoon.

She wants to brush the silky fabric away. Get the hell out of here. Run. Go home again. Instead, her eyes close again.

 

* * *

 

The room is still a cave when she wakes up.

She had hoped it was a dream. Maybe all of it was a dream, Peter and the lizard man and the Goblin’s cheerful cackle when he hit his target. Maybe there was never a radioactive spider, and Gwen would wake up in the real world and have a prom date who didn’t go running across rooftops and get her thrown off the side of buildings.

Instead, she wakes up alone in a cave. The rocks stretch high above her head, darkness looming in the corners as far as she can see. “Where _am_ I?” she mutters, letting her head fall back. “What happened?”

A shape emerges from the darkness. Gwen struggles to prop herself up on her elbows. It’s a person, she realizes, dressed in black, swinging in a way that’s all too familiar.

Swinging like a spider.

“ _Peter_?” Gwen cries. “Peter, what the hell?”

The person drops down to the ground and tosses a hood back, revealing chin-length black hair, pale skin, and a red scarf tied around their nose and mouth. “Not Peter, I’m afraid,” the girl says, muffled through the fabric.

“Who are you? Let me down? Why are you keeping me here?”

The girl reaches up and unties the scarf, letting it fall to the ground. She’s pretty, or at least she would be if she weren’t holding Gwen captive in a cave. The rest of her outfit is black and form-fitting, her feet bare and hands in red gloves. A pattern is stretched in white across the front -- a spiderweb.

“My name is Cindy Moon.” She grins. “You can call me Silk.”

 

* * *

 

Silk, Gwen learns, is Peter’s sister, spider-ways. She doesn’t call herself that -- she didn’t react to Peter’s name, Gwen doesn’t think she knows who he is, but she figures it out herself, once Silk mentions a radioactive spider bite and powers appearing overnight. Same spider. Same powers. There’s another one. Someone like Peter, someone with his powers, someone who would understand. Gwen wants to tell him.

“I found you bleeding out on the ground,” Silk tells her. “You were rocking a broken leg, a fracture in your wrist, and what I’m guessing was a pretty hardcore concussion. You should be okay now. Or pretty close to it.”

“How… how long have I been here?”

“Eight days.”

Gwen starts. “You’re saying I recovered from a broken leg and a fractured wrist in a week? That’s… not possible.”

“Isn’t it?” Silk flashes her a grin.

“What…” Gwen gapes. She tugs frantically at her hand, which catches in a tangle of webbing. When she gets it free, she realizes what the ache in the back of it was. A raised, red circle the size of a dime, punctuated with two tiny fang marks. A spider bite. “What did you _do_ to me?”

Silk disappears for a moment, swinging into a corner of the room. She comes back holding a jar that she throws to Gwen. Without thinking, Gwen catches it in both hands, turning it around to examine it. There’s a spider. She doesn’t know what kind, but it’s round and fuzzy and black, and its fangs are dripping green and blue. Glowing liquid is pooling in the bottom of the jar. “Courtesy of our friends at Oscorp,” Silk announces.

Gwen nearly drops it. “You stole a radioactive spider from Oscorp?”

“Correction,” Silk says, practically glowing with pride. “I stole all of the radioactive spiders from Oscorp.”

“What the hell? Why?”

“I think you already know the answer to that question,” Silk says. Her smile melts away, replaced with a solemn face and dark eyes, and she sounds entirely serious as she says, “They aren’t going to get away with what they did. What they’re doing.”

“So this is your revenge quest?” Gwen snaps. “Why should I give a shit about your revenge? You did the same thing to me, didn’t you? Gave me…” She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. They know what she means.

Silk sighs. “I know. I… I’m sorry, but you were going to die. I could feel it.” Her eyes meet Gwen’s. “I didn’t want that to happen. So I didn’t let it.”

“What, do you want my thanks? A fucking bouquet? I didn’t ask for you to save me, especially not by…” she waves a hand to indicate herself and the cave. “By giving me weird fucking spider powers and tying me up in a cave. Couldn’t you have just, I don’t know, dropped me off at the hospital?”

“I didn’t _tie you up_ ,” Silk says with a snort, plainly ignoring the last thing Gwen said. “You can get out any time you want.”

“How am I supposed to do that? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of wrapped up in a shit ton of webbing.”

Silk smiles, baring teeth. “Oh, I’m sure you can figure it out, Spider-Girl.”

 

* * *

 

 

“I am not going to be Spider-Girl,” Gwen tells Silk later, once she’s landed flat on her feet on the cave floor and ripped every fiber of webbing off of her skin and clothes.

Silk barely looks at her, too busy doing something involving her hands and webbing. “We’ll see about that.”

“No,” Gwen says flatly, and it’s enough to make Silk’s eyes flick up to her for a long moment. “I’m not saying no. To getting back at Oscorp, to… this. Your crusade or whatever. But no one is calling me Spider-Girl.”

One corner of Silk’s mouth curves up. “Your prerogative,” she says with a shrug. “Can I ask why?”

“For one, it’s boring. I’m not having criminals think I’m unimaginative. For another…” Gwen mirrors Silk’s shrug. “I’m kind of dating Spider-Man, and I’m not really into couple nicknames.”

Silk falters in her weaving. “You’re what?”

“Um. I’m dating Spider-Man.” Gwen blows a long breath out. “Or… I was dating Spider-Man. Before I died.”

“You didn’t die,” Silk points out.

“Does _he_ know that?”

“Point taken,” she says after a moment. “You can’t tell him, you know.”

Gwen bites her lip, and then yelps. The taste of iron fills her mouth, and she can feel it drip from her lip down to her chin. “What the hell, do I have _fangs_?” She feels around with her tongue -- yeah, those are fangs. Those are definitely fangs.

“Well, that’s new.” Silk stands, peering at Gwen’s mouth with interest. “I wonder why it happened to you and not me. Does Spider-Man --”

“No,” Gwen says hastily. “He does not. I would have noticed. But he does -- his web isn’t real. I mean, it is real,” she corrects at Silk’s raised eyebrow. “It exists. But he makes it. It isn’t biological, like yours is.” She nods towards Silk’s hands, still tangled in her webs. “So maybe it’s different for everyone?”

“Maybe,” Silk says, sounding unconvinced. “So… if you’re not going by Spider-Girl, what do you want to go by?”

“Let’s go with…” Gwen bounces on the balls of her feet. “Weaver.”

 

* * *

 

Gwen, it turns out, does not have Silk’s biological webbing. That seems to be a perk reserved for Silk herself, which suits Gwen just fine. Silk spins her a suit, a mirror of her own with the web stretched across her chest, except Gwen’s is white with black detailing. “Good?” Silk asks, something anxious in her voice. Gwen nods. She’s sure her grin looks strange under the pale pink scarf tied around the bottom of her face, but she can’t help it.

Silk grins. “Nice to meet you, Weaver.”  


Gwen agrees. It is nice to meet her.


End file.
